(I would REMIND you when reading these the proposed obama regulations have no teeth no enforcement!) A year after the financial system nearly collapsed, the nation's biggest banks are bigger and regaining their appetite for risk.
Goldman Sachs [GS

European and Asian markets fell Monday, shaken by news of a trade dispute between the US and China over tariffs on tires. Asian indexes lost as much as 2% and Wall Street was expected to fall later. Dow industrials futures were down 81 points at 9,45

What I am about to propose is part of a general proposed reshaping of our economic system and must naturally be somewhat out of context. In short, there is a lot more than what I am now describing.
Minimum wage must be properly backstopped and ope

President Obama plans to use the first anniversary of Lehman Brothers' collapse to talk about plans to wind down the government role in a financial sector that needed a Washington bailout last year, an administration official said.
Obama's speech

[Circuit City] had over 500 stores nationwide. That's a lot of empty retail space.
Well, fortunately the Halloween season has come to revive these
abandoned "superstores" and breathe new life into them.

Like
a battering ram in a medieval siege, gold keeps hammering away at
the gate. For the third time in less than twelve months, the yellow
metal is once again crashing into the $1,000 per ounce level. As
of press time, it looks like gold will close above that level today
and will set a new record in the process.
Even if the breach is
fleeting, who can doubt that it will mount another assault soon?
In the meantime, there is no shortage of market analysts who are
not buying gold while questioning the motives of those who are.
Although they offer a variety of strained reasons, they nearly all
agree that it has nothing to do with inflation, which is nearly
universally considered dead and buried. As a self-confessed gold
bug, I can assure all that inflation is the only reason I buy gold.
A

This week marks the end of the dollar’s reign as the world’s reserve currency.
It marks the start of a terrible period of economic and political
decline in the United States. And it signals the last gasp of the
American imperium. That’s over. It is not coming back. And what is to
come will be very, very painful.

Barack Obama, and the criminal class on
Wall Street, aided by a corporate media that continues to peddle
fatuous gossip and trash talk as news while we endure the greatest
economic crisis in our history, may have fooled us, but the rest of the
world knows we are bankrupt. And these nations are damned if they are
going to continue to prop up an inflated dollar and sustain the massive
federal budget deficits, swollen to over $2 trillion, which fund
America’s imperial expansion in Eurasia and our system of casino
capitalism

A new paper from the New America Foundation urges that US to adopt a policy of moderate inflation in order to allevieate the massive public and private debt burden.
Authored by Chris Hayes, the Washington DC editor of the Nation, the paper argues that too much debt will have a deadening effect on the economy, as people are consigned to “debtor serfdom” and the government cannot afford to provide basic services because of the cost of making its debt payments.
“The surest way to avoid such a fate is to jettison a central, indeed the central axiom of post-1970s neoliberal global capitalism, and that is to embrace a period of moderate, sustained inflation,” Hayes argues. He provides this chart showing that our debt has grown while inflation has stayed low.

Sue Vaughn, the school’s principal, says she halted the student paper’s
publication in part over information about the information about the
contractor’s religious bias. Taylor Erickson, 17, a student at the
school, says administrators told him the information about the
“mission” to “serve God” was “irrelevant,”

It’s hard to believe now, but not long ago economists were
congratulating themselves over the success of their field. Those
successes — or so they believed — were both theoretical and practical,
leading to a golden era for the profession.

Can hundreds of stock-selling insiders be wrong?
The stock market has mounted an historic rally since it hit a low in March. The S&P 500 is up 55%, as U.S. job losses have slowed and credit markets have stabilized.
But against that improving backdrop, one indicator has turned distinctly bearish: Corporate officers and directors have been selling shares at a pace last seen just before the onset of the subprime malaise two years ago.

What made Summers' frank comment important is that it suggests this
just-add-gas relationship may now be malfunctioning. The American
economy has been shedding jobs much, much faster than Okun's law
predicts.
According to that rough rule, we should be at about 8.5%
unemployment today, not slipping toward 10%. Something new and possibly
strange seems to be happening in this recession. Something unpredicted
by the experts.
"I don't think," Summers told the Peterson Institute
crowd — deviating again from his text — "that anyone fully understands
this phenomenon." And that raises some worrying questions.

Do not be fooled by the talking heads on TV - the above graph proves what is really going on and what is at stake. It is not possible to "restart" credit demand among consumers as we have failed in our efforts to boost consumer income, the means by which one pays debt. The consumer has hit the wall as ever-increasing demands on income for the necessities of life - the price of which (food, fuel and medical care in particular) has risen much faster than their income and they are trapped. Finally, the insane ramp in Federal Borrowing has resulted in a precipitous decline in the value of the dollar - a decline that is now threatening to become disorderly.
In other words, policy actions have had and will have no impact on the group that must recover for a durable economic recovery - the consumer - as those lower borrowing costs either can't be or haven't been passed through but instead are being STOLEN to cover up bank insolvencies and are CAUSING upward pressure

Employers' hiring plans for the upcoming fourth quarter dropped to their lowest level in the history of Manpower's Employment Outlook Survey, which started in 1962.
A net -3% of employers said they'll hire in the fourth quarter, down from -2% in the third quarter, on a seasonally adjusted basis, according to the Milwaukee-based firm's survey of more than 28,000 employers. Before this year, the survey's previous low point was a net 1% hiring outlook for the third quarter of 1982.

Bashing “speculators” is a popular pastime for politicians trying to explain high and volatile oil prices. But the real culprits for oil-price volatility may be much more familiar: supply, demand and global instability.

Congress and the Obama administration have lost faith in [ahem] self-regulated
markets. Together, they're writing the most sweeping new regulations
over finance since the Great Depression. And in this
ever-more-connected global economy, Washington is working with its
partners through the G-20 group of nations to develop worldwide rules
to govern finance.

There is something affected, something not believable, something agitpropish, about all the cheers for the glorious economic recovery we are supposed to be experiencing. Even some of the recovery's biggest boosters don't quite believe it.
I'm thinking of the reporter on National Public Radio a few days ago who, at the end of a segment, offered a passing warning that the bust did not come to an "organic" end, but rather was artificially stopped by government intervention.

SPRINGFIELD, Mass., Sept. 9 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Smith & Wesson Holding Corporation (Nasdaq: SWHC), parent company of Smith & Wesson Corp., the legendary 157-year old company in the global business of safety, security, protection and sport, today announced financial results for the first fiscal quarter ended July 31, 2009.
Net sales for the first fiscal quarter ended July 31, 2009 were $102.2 million, which was $23.8 million, or 30.3%, higher than net sales of $78.5 million for the first fiscal quarter last year. Gross profit of $35.6 million, or 34.8% of sales, for the first quarter of fiscal 2010 increased by 43.4% compared with gross profit of $24.8 million, or 31.7% of sales, for the first quarter last year. Net income for the first quarter of fiscal 2010 was $12.6 million, or $0.21 per diluted share, compared with $2.3 million, or $0.05 per diluted share, for the first quarter of fiscal 2009. Net income included a non-cash, fair-value adjustment to the contingent considera

Now the buyers are running out of time and money. Paid $5.4 billion and an additional $890 million set
aside for apartment renovations, landscaping and interest payments.
Rents are down 25 percent from their peak.

Real estate analysts
say that the partnership’s money will run out as soon as December and
that the owners are at “high risk” of default on $4.4 billion in loans.

You likely heard that the Central Bank Gold Agreement was extended by the signatory banks last month. This is the agreement where central banks around the world agree to limit sales and to do so in an orderly fashion so as to not disrupt prices.

While most writers focused on the fact that the agreement set a lower limit (400 tonnes per year, down from 500) – clearly a bullish indicator – I think there’s a more obvious fact many are overlooking that’s even more bullish.

In the first two 5-year agreements, CBGA signatories sold 4,000 tonnes of gold, or approximately 141 million ounces. This is an incredible amount of gold to dump on the market; it’s equivalent to almost two entire years of global production. Based on an average gold selling price over those 10 years of $600, this equals approximately $84.6 billion of gold.

The dollar fell against most major currencies and is at the same level
as it was before it became a safe haven for investors who became
jittery after Lehman Bros. collapsed. The dollar is "falling victim to a kind of double whammy"
that was the result of the government's efforts to pump more dollars
into the economy. Investors seem to be convinced that the efforts had
the desired effect and the global economy will soon get out of
recession, so they're willing to take on more risk. When combined
with the high supply of dollars and low interest rates, that has made
the dollar quite unattractive. Instead of dollar-based securities,
investors are snapping up gold and other commodities.

This is from ProPublica the stimulous watchdog now even if we were to accept slip of the lip Joes assessment I just wanted to point out wouldn't that be about $1 Million of your tax dollars per job created.? Hey Joe someone on your staff should give you a reality check the job outlook has hit the WORSE-EVER level. If you put lipstick on a pig it is still a PIG! The rest is worth reading to see how your money is spent.
Vice President Joe Biden marked the 200-day point of the stimulus package today with a speech at the Brookings Institution, where he spent nearly an hour ticking off its achievements so far. Among other things, Biden said some economists had given the $787 billion stimulus bill credit for creating 500,000 to 750,000 jobs and boosting the gross domestic product in the two most recent quarters.

[looks like they are getting us warmed up to the NWO ED] One year after the near collapse of the global financial system, this much is clear: The financial world as we knew it is over, and something new is rising from its ashes.

Historians will look to September 2008 as a watershed for the U.S. economy. [notice no explanation of the CAUSE ED]

On Sept. 7 , the government seized mortgage titans Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac . Eight days later, investment bank Lehman Brothers
filed for bankruptcy, sparking a global financial panic that threatened
to topple blue-chip financial institutions around the world. In the
several months that followed, governments from Washington to Beijing
responded with unprecedented intervention into financial markets and
across their economies, seeking to stop the wreckage and stem the
damage.

One year later, the easy-money system that financed the boom era from
the 1980s until a year ago is smashed. Once-ravenous U.S. consum

The Card-Krueger work is essentially correct: the minimum wage at levels observed in the United States has had little or no effect on employment. At the minimum, the book has changed the burden of proof in debates over the minimum, from those who stressed the potential distributional benefits of the minimum to those who stress the potential employment losses."--Richard B. Freeman, Journal of Economic Perspectives

Although a number of countries, including China and Russia, have suggested replacing the dollar as the world's reserve
currency, the
UNCTAD report is the first time a major multinational institution
has posited such a suggestion.

In essence, the report calls for a new Bretton Woods-style system of managed
international exchange rates, meaning central banks would be forced to
intervene and either support or push down their currencies depending on how
the rest of the world economy is behaving.

The proposals would also imply that surplus nations such as China and Germany
should stimulate their economies further in order to cut their own
imbalances, rather than, as in the present system, deficit nations such as
the UK and US having to take the main burden of readjustment.